Originally Posted by
houleskis
Gang,
I'm coming up the the end of my first track racing season. It's been lots of fun and I've made some OK progress. I feel that to keep progressing I'll have to do more than just focus on crits and flat road races in the summer and hope that with some programming tweaks in the fall (i.e. adding more intensity) I'm in good shape.
I've found surprisingly little resources on training and programming for enduro trackies (my focus); it's mostly all roadie based. The best is seems is to mirror criterium racing plans. Does anyone have any better resources to read up on?
Unfortunately, hiring a coach isn't quite possible at the moment due to costs (a lot of my disposable income is going to track racing and training sessions it seems!!).
You're right that mirroring crit racing plans is a good way to go, and yeah - there aren't a whole lot of published sources for specifics on track cycling workout.
In general, I've found it helpful to work on short-term power output - a lot of stuff in the Vo2max range. In general, you don't need super high power values for any given duration. That's base work, sure, but as you get closer to the season, what's better is repeatability of hard efforts, and cadence optimization. A lot of LT over/unders. Sprints, from speed, with an effort in your legs (so like negative-split workouts).
If your threshold doesn't support either the amount or intensity of VO2max work needed to improve, then you might need to back up and work on your threshold, but quite frankly for the shortness and level of intensity of track races, you don't need a lot of "push" threshold work, or a bunch of tempo volume, or a lot of that roadie blather.
Sprint work is good (obviously), and here's where track work really comes into handy, and cadence optimization helps the most. You can do 3x3s and other VO2max work on a road bike just fine but to hone your enduro sprint you'll need to work at high RPMs and a single gear.
You can use crits to train, but it means you can't race them like crits. It means you have to race them stupid. Like a greyhound: every time a rabbit goes, go after it. You can pretend that one 60-min crit is two regulation (15km) scratch races - the first 20 minutes, go bonkers (try to make the break or break the field), then rest for 15-20 mins, and then do the same for the last 20 minutes.